Huawei's 'Spark A Renaissance' photography competition has an AI judge

Huawei is literally taking things a notch (pun unintended) higher this time. The Chinese smartphone major has launched a photography contest inviting photographers to submit their best shots. What's the big deal you ask? While we've seen AI helping frame shots and composition in modern smartphones, this is probably the first time a photography contest is being judged by AI. Huawei is betting on the P20 Pro's AI capabilities to pick a winner. In the final leg of the competition, the AI will be accompanied by Alex Lambrechts, a Leica professional photographer, who will co-review the images and decide who gets to the win the Grand Prize.

The 'Spark A Renaissance' contest started from July 12 and will run for 8 weeks. It will have 5 themes viz. A New Renaissance, After Dark, Deep in Detail, Moment in Time, and Wide-Eyed World. Entries for 'A New Renaissance' have now closed and entries for 'After Dark' will be accepted from July 24. Entries for the final 'Wide-Eyed World' theme will start on August 28. A Facebook Messenger chatbot will guide users in submitting the entries. The P20 Pro's AI will then evaluate it on various metrics. According to Huawei,

Trained using 4,000,000 images taken by professional photographers and picture editors the AI will then give each photo a personalised AI score based on parameters such as focus, jitter, deflection, colour and composition."

Andrew Garrihy, CMO Huawei Western Europe said,

We have trained the AI in our P20 Pro smartphone to understand what makes an amazing photo. This innovation is helping us to identify emerging creative talent across Europe and showcase their photography potential to others.”

A total of 10 winners will be chosen across all the themes and will be awarded a P20 Pro each and flown to Florence, Italy to attend a photography master class by Leica pro photographer Alex Lambrechts. During the Florence trip, there will another round of photo submissions and this time, AI and Lambrechts will co-judge the submissions to pick a final winner who will stand to win a grand tour across three European countries. Other top photos from the competition will be sold to raise money for a local charity. 

Sounds like fun? What are you waiting for? Submit your entries to our future robot overlords and get a chance to tour the European countryside. Before you whip out your cameras, do note that the competition is only open to legal residents of Europe. 

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